Fictional Worlds and the Political Imagination

There has been a steady stream of articles written on the relations between political thought and the interpretation of literature, but there remains a need for a book that both introduces and significantly contributes to the field – particularly one that shows in detail how we can think more freely and creatively about political possibilities by reading and reflecting on politically significant literature. This volume offers analytically acute and culturally rich ways of understanding how it is that we can productively think philosophically about political literature and what kind of distinctive conceptual progress we can make by doing so. Given the extremely widespread interest in political issues, this volume will strike resonant chords far and wide, while offering something that has not been done quite in this way and for which the time certainly seems right.Table of Content1. Introduction: Occasions for Reflection on Political Possibility.- Part I. Relations Between Literary and Political Writing.- 2. J. M. Coetzee’s Fictional Ethics, Christian Howard-Sukhil.- 3. Never Out of Style: On the Critique of Literary Devices in Political Philosophy, Charlie van Veen and Catherine M. Robb.- 4. The Transpolitical Role of Poetry according to Joseph Brodsky and Seamus Heaney, Lewis Fallis.- 5. The Antagonism of Thomas Carlyle’s Romanticism and John Rawls’s Rationalism on Social and Distributive Justice, Brian Wolfel.- II. Political Psychology Depicted.- 6. Boredom as a Propositional Attitude: Reading Alberto Moravia with Hegel, Eliza Starbuck Little.- 7. Beyond Tyranny: Ethical Imagination, Erotic Education, and Justice in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, Dustin Gish.- 8. Mimetic Rivalry and the Scapegoat Mechanism in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, Sina Movaghati.-III. Power, Violence, Resistance: Overt and Subtle, Physical and Symbolic.- 9. “Command me, Confessor": Violence, Power, and Ethics within Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth Series, Benjamin Carpenter.- 10. Leontius in Vietnam: The Aesthetics of Violence in Michael Herr’s Dispatches, Luke Sayers.- 11. African Scarification and Slavery: from Anthropology to Allegory, Michael Janis.- 12.Flaubert and Marx on 1848, Divya Menon.- IV. Outward Corruption, Inner Corrosion, Aesthetic Redemption.- 13. Platonic Corruption in The Handmaid’s Tale, Andy Lamey.- 14. Michael Corleone, Truly Unregulated Capitalist: The Godfather II as Political Allegory and Ethical Catastrophe, Garry L. Hagberg.- 15. Retheorizing the Aristotelians’ Catharsis: The Role of Memories in Narrating and Purging Emotions, Shilpi Saxena and Diksha Sharma.- 16. The Philosopher at the Gate of the Word: A Study of Simone Weil’s Transformative Literature, Caprioglio Panizza and Philip Wilson.Biographical NoteGarry L. Hagberg is the James H. Ottaway Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics at Bard College, USA and Editor of the journal Philosophy and Literature. Author of four books and editor of nine volumes, he is presently completing a new book, Consciousness Portrayed: Seven Case Studies in Philosophical Literature.There has been a steady stream of articles written on the relations between political thought and the interpretation of literature, but there remains a need for a book that both introduces and significantly contributes to the field – particularly one that shows in detail how we can think more freely and creatively about political possibilities by reading and reflecting on politically significant literature. This volume offers analytically acute and culturally rich ways of understanding how it is that we can productively think philosophically about political literature and what kind of distinctive conceptual progress we can make by doing so. Given the extremely widespread interest in political issues, this volume will strike resonant chords far and wide, while offering something that has not been done quite in this way and for which the time certainly seems right.Garry L. Hagberg is the James H. Ottaway Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics at Bard College, USA and Editor of the journal Philosophy and Literature. Author of four books and editor of nine volumes, he is presently completing a new book, Consciousness Portrayed: Seven Case Studies in Philosophical Literature.Explores the relations between political thought and the interpretation of literature Considers what kind of distinctive conceptual progress can be made when thinking about political literature Shows how we can think more creatively about political possibilities by considering politically significant literature